Entrepreneurs, don't give up your day jobs (yet)

This article was taken from the March 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

To be a great entrepreneur, you need three things: courage, confidence and commitment. The best founders are daredevils who take big risks to bring their ideas into the world. They never doubt themselves even in the face of rejection. And they are obsessed to the point that they will sacrifice almost anything, because starting a company requires complete devotion.

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These beliefs are widespread, but they are dead wrong. Last year, researchers Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng published a landmark study. Called "Should I Quit My Day Job?: A Hybrid Path to Entrepreneurship", it tracked a nationally representative group of thousands of US entrepreneurs over 15 years. It revealed that those who started companies while keeping their day jobs were 33 per cent less likely to fail than the ones who went all in.

It may not be a coincidence that Phil Knight spent five years selling running shoes before leaving his full-time accounting job to start Nike. That Steve Wozniak stuck around at Hewlett-Packard for a year after inventing the Apple computer. Or that Bill Gates spent a year at Harvard after selling his first software program, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin waited two years after building their search engine to leave Stanford and launch Google.

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Keeping the day job gives you the time and resources to refine. If you're committed to entrepreneurship, you have to worry about quarterly results. That means putting all your eggs in the basket where they're most likely to hatch quickly. By keeping your day job, you gain a licence to tinker and iterate.

After Sara Blakely dreamed up the idea for footless pantyhose, she held on to her full-time job selling fax machines. Rather than succumbing to the pressure to ship a product immediately, she spent the next two years perfecting her prototype. That prototype -- Spanx -- made her a self-made billionaire.

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Hanging around in your day job also creates more flexibility to pivot. "I gave up my job for this idea," you think, "so I have to see it through." If it's just a hobby and it falters, you'll have no qualms about moving on to the next idea.

When Markus Persson was working as a programmer, he built video games in his spare time. If game development was his only source of income, he would have focused on making his existing creations commercially successful. Instead, he started working on a new game. He posted Minecraft unfinished on a gaming portal. He kept his day job for a year before committing full-time. Minecraft became the most popular computer game of all time, and he sold it to Microsoft for $2.5 billion (£1.7bn).

In the research, the founders who kept their day jobs and dipped a toe into entrepreneurial waters were more risk-averse, less self-confident and less committed than their peers who dove in headfirst. According to conventional wisdom, their businesses survived in spite of those traits. But in reality, they succeeded because of their hesitations. Being risk-averse led them to look carefully before leaping in. Self-doubt led them to question their ideas. And wavering commitment motivated them to seek honest feedback about which ideas were really worth pursuing.

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Quitting your full-time job to start a company is like proposing marriage on the first date. For every successful startup with a swashbuckler at the helm, there are many more that fail. The most durable businesses are typically started by people who play it safe.

So next time you have a big idea, don't go in all guns blazing. Start it as a hobby and see if it takes off.

Adam Grant is a professor of psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World (WH Allen)

This article was first published in the March 2016 issue of WIRED magazine